Austin, Texas is renowned as the live music capital of the world touted as having the most musicians per capita of any city in the world. With over one hundred live performance places there are always scores of Austin, Texas bands to see any time of year of all different styles from country to rock, to a variety of eclectic styles that can be heard no where else.
Austin, TX is also the host of the South By Southwest music conference which is a nationally known music festival showcasing 1,800 bands of all styles booked from across the whole world in over eighty clubs in Austin over a five day period. South By Southwest was originally just a little music festival that grew into an enormous live music fest with bands participating from around the entire world and continues to grow each year. There are other world renowned emerging music festivals in Austin as well, such as the Austin City Limits Music Festival, Urban Music Festival, and the Fun Fun Fun Fest. The Austin City Limits Music Festival happens once a year in the fall and is a three day music extravaganza with over 130 bands of all genres on eight stages. This event has been known to attract over 65,000 people and bands from all over the globe. The Urban Music Festival started in 2006 and drew a crowd in excess of 9,000 to hear some of the top Urban Music bands. Some of the performers of the Urban Music Fest have been Cameo, Boyz to Men, and the Sugar Hill Gang. The Fun Fun Fun Fest Is another yearly music festival that started in 2005 and has showcased a wide scope of artists over a few days on four stages. A few famous artists of the Fun Fun Fun Fest have been the Bad Brains, All and The Dead Milkmen.
How Austin, TX came to be the home base for so many Austin bands is still a mystery but as the music scene grew through time in Austin, the stigma that it was the place to get discovered and make it to stardom started to draw a stampede of talented musicians from across the nation. The bands and musicians that came to Austin looking for fame soon found that there wasn’t any music industry to sign them there aside from the brief visit of industry professionals during South By Southwest music conference and the great supply of musicians and Austin cover bands only made finding gigs even harder because of all of the stiff competition. The number of Austin, TX bands far exceeds the number of rooms offering jobs so only the best sounding bands end up getting the jobs thereby furthering the popular perception that Austin bands tend to be the greatest in the state. Many musicians that had come to Austin hoping to make it in the local scene headed back where they came from to face less competition and found that being a big fish in a small pond was easier and more productive than slugging it out with tons of bands in one town for the few jobs there were amidst such a competitive music marketplace.
There are many musicians that come from Austin, Texas including Robert Earl Keen, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Willie Nelson, Dangerous Toys, Pat Green and Los Lonely Boys to name a few. All these things add up to make Austin, Texas a town that has been renowned as the “Live Music Capital of the World”.
